Having sampled many flavors of pre-production Accords at a press event in August, we were anxious to see what Honda's new Earth Dreams i-VTEC 4-cylinder would do on a chassis dyno. A few weeks ago, we managed to get our hands on a production version of Honda's brand-new 2013 Accord Sport CVT, so we promptly took it over our normal testing facility (Dynolab in Marietta, GA) and strapped the car to the rollers.

We were hoping to sample the 6MT version of this car, but they are not yet available in the press fleet for loan. Thus, the dyno charts you will see here are a little bit different than what you might be accustomed to seeing. For one thing, the fact that this car is a CVT means that plotting HP and Torque curves against an RPM-based x-axis just doesn't work very well, so that's why we have split up these charts. Also, we made a few passes in the simulated 7-speed "Sport" mode in an attempt to emulate what an in-gear pass on a traditional manual transmission car would look like, but even in the "fixed" gear runs there was a little bit of variable gear ratio action going on. See the charts and notes below.

CVT Mode Dyno Plots (click to enlarge)

Here are the horsepower and torque curves plotted against roller speed. In this plot the Accord was tested in the standard D mode.

In this plot, we show the horsepower vs the roller speed, but also plot the rpm curve on the secondary y axis to show how the revs build and hold.

This is just like the above chart, except this shows the torque curve along with the rpm curve.

This is an interesting plot which shows the CVT's effective gear ratio (expressed as rpms/mph) along with the horsepower curve

"Fixed gear" S Mode Dyno Plots (click to enlarge)

This is the horsepower and torque curves vs rpm in "S" mode with it locked into 3rd gear. We discovered that the transmission automatically upshifts in this mode as it reaches the rev limiter

This plot shows horsepower in the S3 mode alongside the calculated gear ratio. You can see that even in the stepped gear modes, there is some variation in the effective gear ratio

This is just like the above chart, except this shows the torque curve along with the effective gear ratio. The scale for the gear ratio axis is more exaggerated in this plot.

This plot compares output in "D" mode vs the fixed gear "S" mode. As you can see, maximum average power is clearly delivered in CVT mode. Ignore the big blip at the end of the S-mode plot (red). That's where the transmission upshifted

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